BLUFF 06 a poetry symposium in Southland 21-24 April 2006
Cilla McQueen, David Howard and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) present four days of readings, discussion, launches and digital outreach in Bluff and Rakiura.
Featured writers: Rob Allan, Tusiata Avia, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, John Dolan, Martin Edmond, Murray Edmond, David Eggleton, Cliff Fell, Brian Flaherty, Paula Green, Michael Harlow, Bernadette Hall, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Therese Lloyd, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Cilla McQueen, Emma Neale, Richard Reeve, Jack Ross, Brian Turner
Venues Te Rau Aroha Marae, cnr Bradshaw and Henderson Sts, Bluff. 03 212 7205. Free admission to all sessions The Community Centre, Halfmoon Bay, Rakiura. $10 adults, $2 children
THURSDAY 20 APRIL
Afternoon Arrivals check in at Marae or hotels. Own arrangements Invercargill to Bluff for those flying
Evening Informal get-together for poets and crew (Cilla McQueen)
Te Rau Aroha night #1
FRIDAY 21 APRIL
Te Rau Aroha Marae
Morning Set up book table, anthology laptop, seating, PA, screen and data projector (crew)
12.00 Book table open. nzepc online anthology begins: bring a poem on a disk to any of the symposium events or email your contribution to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz between 21-23 April
1.30 Powhiri / welcome. Visitors assemble at main gate
2.30 Afternoon tea
3.00 Symposium keynote Richard Reeve. The South Island Myth: observations on the ethics of mystery in the work of three local poets
3.45 Webpage launches Cilla McQueen, David Howard and David Eggleton (nzepc)
4.30 Book and CD launch David Eggleton Fast Talker (AUP). Cilla McQueen and the Blue Neutrinos A Wind Harp (UOP)
6.00 Dinner, stories from the house (Te Rau Aroha)
8.00 Evening Reading Bernadette Hall (MC) and Murray Edmond, Cliff Fell, Bian Flaherty, Paula Green, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Therese Lloyd, Selina Tusitala Marsh
Te Rau Aroha night #2
SATURDAY 22 APRIL
Te Rau Aroha Marae. Book table open 9.30-3.30. Anthology continues.
9.30 Workshop Words and Places: Jack Ross and all comers produce collaborative texts for BLUFF 06
12.00 Lunch. Poem posters on display
1.00 Presentations 1 Selina Tusitala Marsh. Casting the (Inter)net in Oceania: Pasifika Poetry Web Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. Making up the Mauri: Elsdon Best and Henry Williams' Dictionary
2.00 Presentations 2 Murray Edmond. One World One Voice: A Reading of ‘So There’ by Robert Creeley (1926-2005) Michele Leggott and Helen Sword. Lola Ridge: Hokitika, Sydney, San Francisco, New York
3.00 Afternoon tea
6.00 Special dinner (Te Rau Aroha)
8.00 Evening Reading Cilla McQueen (MC) and Tusiata Avia, John Dolan, David Eggleton, Michael Harlow, Emma Neale, Brian Turner
Te Rau Aroha night #3
SUNDAY 23 APRIL
Te Rau Aroha Marae and Rakiura. Book table open 10.00-2.30. Anthology continues.
10.00 New in 06 Paula Green, Bernadette Hall, Jack Ross and Murray Edmond talk and read from new publications
11.00 Morning tea
11.30 Presentations 3 Michael Harlow. On Being Translated: Translation and the Third Text Hilary Chung and Jacob Edmond. Chinese Poet on a Kiwi Passport: Yang Lian’s New Zealand Poems
12.30 Lunch
1.00 Presentations 4 Alison Hunt and Bronwyn Lloyd. ‘Ambergris rolls on Hellfire Beach’: Robin Hyde in the South, 1936 Martin Edmond. Ern Malley: the Autobiography of a Fiction
2.15 Poroporaaki / farewell
4.00 Ferry to Rakiura
7.30 Mihi. Evening Reading and launch of online anthology OBAN 06 Gwen Neave (MC) and Rob Allan, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Martin Edmond, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Richard Reeve, Jack Ross
Shearwater Inn night #1
MONDAY 24 APRIL
10.00 Bush beach walk picnic ramble readings
Ferry to Bluff. Onward travel
BLUFF 06 is generously supported by Creative Communities Southland, the Southland District Council & Community Trust, Te Rau Aroha Marae, Toi Rakiura and the University of Auckland
Information David Howard [email protected]
BLUFF 06 BOOK TABLE
Te Rau Aroha Marae, Friday – Sunday afternoon, corridor area between wharenui and wharekai
If you have books you would like to sell, please bring them to our book table from Friday morning 21 April with a list of titles, prices and number of copies. Let us know your preferred method of payment (cash is easiest) and price your books in simple denominations ($10, $15 etc).
Please collect money and unsold books by 2.30 Sunday afternoon.
OBAN 06
is the title of nzepc’s online poetry anthology, building 21-23 April 2006 as part of the BLUFF 06 poetry symposium in Southland. Bluff’s famous Oyster Festival happens over the same weekend.
Bring a poem on a disk to any of the symposium events OR email your contribution to [email protected] between 21-23 April.
We aim to build a local and international poetry anthology over three days, launching Sunday 23 April in Oban on Rakiura (Stewart Island). We welcome your poem. We’d like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going, poetry and oysters – any or all of the above.
If you could see this jet fire-seeded sky, chill here with me on a plastic chair on the veranda, we'd hear Bluff hum while lines of sodium and magnesium bridge and wharf lights bleed to black, inexactly as on other nights, other verandas, another port - a kauri pew, wings on the sill of an inside-out lit window, scrying the dark insistent stars, fireflies - we have talked of poetry.
Cilla McQueen. ‘Antiphony (Letter to Peter Olds)’
Anthology compilers: Brian Flaherty, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen and nzepc team
Submission guidelines • work should be your original composition • if it has been published elsewhere, please include acknowledgement and publication details • the compilers reserve the right to copy-edit contributions before uploading • copyright for individual contributions to the anthology remains with the author
WORDS AND PLACES a workshop for BLUFF 06
• Saturday 22 April, 9.30 am-12 noon
In the tradition of the collective poem and online anthology put together during FUGACITY 05 in Christchurch, you are invited to attend and contribute to the BLUFF 06 symposium workshop.
• Components
There are various components to the exercise we’ll be doing. The first two are:
1/ a poem in a language other than English, with interlinear literal translation and notes.
2/ an anonymous poem in English.
For the rest, you’ll have to wait and see. Please bring along pen, paper and anyone else you think might like to spend the morning writing and talking.
• Results
The end result, by Saturday noon, should be one or more poster-poems for display and impromptu reading. After due consideration, you may wish to type up your poem to be posted to the nzepc online anthology being launched next day in Oban at the final reading of the symposium.
• How can you help?
You can send us a poem.
Either one of your own, in which case you would have to agree to allow other people to play variations on it.
Or, alternatively, those of you who are fluent in – or have studied – another language (or languages) could email me a poem laid out as an interlinear text, with the original above and an English translation under each line (as in the example below). Footnotes on contentious points, double-entendres etc. would also be helpful. Please provide a phonetic transcript if it’s written in a non-Roman script.
What kinds of poem should you choose? Well, up to you. Fairly short ones, up to a page in length. Poems which interest you, or which you find challenging in some way. Something, in the case of non-English poems, which is out of copyright.
The greater the variety, the more interesting the workshop will be.
– Jack Ross [email protected]
• Example of a poem laid out as an interlinear text
Cors de Chasse Hunting Horns
Notre histoire est noble et tragique Our story is noble and tragic Comme le masque d’un tyran Like a tyrant’s mask Nul drame hasardeux ou magique No dangerous or magic drama Aucun détail indifférent No pointless detail Ne rend notre amour pathétique. Renders our love pathetic.
Et Thomas de Quincey buvant And Thomas de Quincey drinking L’opium poison doux et chaste The sweet and chaste poison of opium A sa pauvre Anne allait rêvant went on dreaming of his poor Anne Passons passons puisque tout passe Lets go let’s go since everything passes Je me retournerai souvent I will return often
Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse Memories are hunting horns Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent Whose noise dies amid the wind
– Guillaume Apollinaire
Notes: l.5. pathétique (adj.) – in the (older) sense of an excess of feeling.
PRESENTATIONS FOR BLUFF 06
Hilary Chung and Jacob Edmond. Chinese Poet on a Kiwi Passport: Yang Lian’s New Zealand Poems How do you write exile in a land that has given you political shelter but is incomprehensible to the life of your imagination? What happens to your poetics when the exotic is suddenly where you live and feels like another death each time you step out the door? And how does any of this translate into the language that is doing its best to host you but must perform a double estrangement to understand why you have become a ghost? Yang Lian’s post-Tiananmen Square poems walk out into an unreal city on an isthmus of volcanoes and foetid hothouse decay, fearing multiple failures of memory in themselves and in others.
Martin Edmond. Ern Malley: The Autobiography of a Fiction Central to contemporary Australian poetry is the work of a poet who didn't exist (Pam Brown). Since Ernest Lalor Malley’s creation in 1943, the myth of the hoax poet has grown like Topsy. The recent discovery in Sydney of a manuscript alleged to be an autography in Malley’s hand adds a further dimension … or is it merely vexatious? This talk explores the content of the manuscript and attempts a description of its provenance.
Murray Edmond. One World One Voice: A Reading of ‘So There’ by Robert Creeley (1926-2005) Robert Creeley visited New Zealand in 1976 and the poems he wrote while here became a small book published by Alan Loney's Hawk Press. 'So There' is the most substantial and complex poem in that collection and the one Creeley retained in his Selected Poems. He also recorded it with the band Mercury Rev. The poem and the trip marked a significant point of change for Creeley. Robert Creeley died in March last year and this presentation is also a memorial to an internationally recognised poet who had a unique relationship with New Zealand.
Michael Harlow. On Being Translated: Translation and the Third Text : Some preliminary notes in which no translation is innocent of the deep history of its words and the culture of its languages. In search of a text that is an act of 'original repetition'.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. Making up the Mauri: Elsdon Best and Henry Williams' Dictionary Never heard of Elsdon Best, or just a bit misty about the legendary creator of Tuhoe and The Maori as he was? Best's prolific literary output ranks him as one of our major early 20th century non-fiction writers, and his work is in practically every bibliography that refers to traditional Māori society. This discussion looks at the half- life of Te Peehi's researches in the Williams' Dictionary of the Māori Language and asks the question: is mauri (or any Māori spiritual concept) quite what it used to be?
Selina Tusitala Marsh. Casting the (Inter)net in Oceania: Pasifika Poetry Web How can Pasifika poetry travel to all Oceanic peoples and the rest of the world? In a region of over 30,000 islands access to indigenous texts is a constant challenge now being met by collaborative efforts between poets and technology. Come and hear about the weaving of a net being cast high and wide over Oceania – and see what catch it brings in.
Alison Hunt and Bronwyn Lloyd. ‘Ambergris rolls on Hellfire Beach’: Robin Hyde in the South, 1936 In the spring of 1936 Robin Hyde took her first long parole from the Auckland Mental Hospital where she had been a voluntary patient for three years. She travelled the length of the country, redrafted her autobiographical novel The Godwits Fly in Dunedin, then set out for Central Otago and Southland. By early November she was on the boat for Rakiura and an encounter with the next in a string of islands over the edge of the world that inform her writing and its investigation of places of sanctuary and spiritual preservation.
Michele Leggott and Helen Sword. Lola Ridge: Hokitika, Sydney, San Francisco, New York Irish-born US poet Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was brought by her mother to Australia and then New Zealand as a child. She grew up on the West Coast goldfields, married a miner in 1895 then left her marriage to paint and write in Sydney. In 1907 Ridge arrived in San Francisco and became involved with anarchist politics and literary modernism. She is remembered for her long poem ‘The Ghetto’ (1918), but it is the autobiographical ‘Sun-Up’ (1920) that puts her Australasian past on view and leads to a typescript of poems in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, that show Lola Ridge’s writing career got its start a few kilometres south of Hokitika.
Richard Reeve. The South Island Myth: observations on the ethics of mystery in the work of three local poets The earth, as Martin Heidegger observed, is eternally remote. Globalism, modern literary criticism and biology all suggest that, just as there is no after-life of the soul, the metaphysic of an essential relationship between poet and landscape is redundant. Still, poems draw their power from ‘the poetic’ – that matrix of historical associations which constitutes what sense we can make of the rocks, stumps and streams which comprise our physical frontiers. What form might these historical associations take in Otago and Southland, and how are they reflected in the work of local poets David Howard, Cilla McQueen and David Eggleton? What can we learn from these poets about how to live in the twenty-first century?